I joined when I was around 14, and left (if you can ever leave?) when I was 17. One of those precocious-gifted-child things; and the child subscriptions are fairly low. It was worth it to get the validated IQ score, and bizarrely, the child-MENSA magazine that circulated at the time led to my first real job.
So it can pay off, both if you've ever been curious about your IQ (not that anyone believes such things, but it's still great fun trumping an arrogant arse at a party) and because it's yet another way of networking. But the sort of people who join MENSA might not really be the sort of people you want to network with.
The job story:
An advert had a programming puzzle and an address to send solutions to. I solved the puzzle and realised it was a fiendish form of recruitment for a summer job at a fairly boring, run-of-the-mill web development company (oh, the glory days of 1999).
I also made a few 'friends' through it at the time, but I thought they were all up themselves. (They were. One later turned up to Cambridge, a year after me; can you spell 'socially awkward'? I bet he could.)
Thing is, IQ matters to the arrogant arses that you might want to trump. So for a normal person, the response to "hey, I have 150 IQ, I'm right damnit" is "Oh my god, I can't believe he just said that. Or thinks it matters." But to the person with the 150 IQ who's sure he's right because of it, it may be somewhat more effective to say "Yeah, I have 170, can we talk about something else now?"
Yeah, this is the context I mean, though more so on IQ scores themselves, rather than "I'm right because my IQ is x". In some wannabe-intellectual circles, the "My IQ is.." dicksize contest does come up, and it's fun being able to quietly speak up and shut them all up.
So it can pay off, both if you've ever been curious about your IQ (not that anyone believes such things, but it's still great fun trumping an arrogant arse at a party) and because it's yet another way of networking. But the sort of people who join MENSA might not really be the sort of people you want to network with.
The job story:
An advert had a programming puzzle and an address to send solutions to. I solved the puzzle and realised it was a fiendish form of recruitment for a summer job at a fairly boring, run-of-the-mill web development company (oh, the glory days of 1999).
I also made a few 'friends' through it at the time, but I thought they were all up themselves. (They were. One later turned up to Cambridge, a year after me; can you spell 'socially awkward'? I bet he could.)